Peggy Cummins, actress – obituary

Peggy Cummins on the set of Night of the DemonCredit:
Sunset Boulevard/Corbis via Getty Images

3 January 2018 • 6:31pm

Peggy Cummins, who has died aged 92, was a pre-war child actress on the Dublin and London stage, who progressed to ingénue roles in British films and had a brief, inglorious encounter with Hollywood when she was hired and fired from Forever Amber (1947).

This incident became the focal point of her career. At the age of only 19, she was picked from 125 young aspirants to play the heroine of Kathleen Winsor’s sensational bestseller about a cocotte at the court of King Charles II. Though bowderlised in keeping with contemporary censorship requirements, the film version was still risqué by the standards of the time.

It proved a fraught production. Miss Cummins collapsed twice on set, costing the studio £6,000 a day; the original director quit and at one point a union dispute plunged the soundstage in darkness. Twentieth Century-Fox finally pulled the plug on it, sacked its leading lady and brought...